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Sunday, August 7, 2011

When I got up yesterday morning, Microsoft Updates had downloaded a new update for my computer, which, when installed, caused my computer to deny me access to all of my Excel files. Which are numerous, and important. I spent a couple hours trying to deal with it myself (System Restore didn't help.), followed by an hour and five minutes on the phone with a very nice man from India. He was able to fix everything because the husband had an installation disk for MS Excel 2003: whatever the problem was, it had something to do with MS Office 2002. Had the husband not had the installation disc, I would have been unable to access Excel from this computer forever after, apparently. (The alternative -- spending $130 to buy MS Office 2010 -- was not an option.)

(Computers! Why do we put up with them?)

This ate up the entire morning. The afternoon was spent being Way Too Hot in Iowa City, which was unpleasant (though I did get to see WCW for the first time in months and months, which was cool). Then we came home, put away groceries, got started on watering the 50 plants left to be watered for this particular round of watering, and then the husband noticed Sheba was limping around.

Upon examination, this turned out to be a split toenail. It's not bleeding, and she doesn't actually seem that uncomfortable about it, but of course a little Googling led to anxiety, and anxiety to dithering, and eventually we called an actual veterinary-type source, who said basically that the broken part of the toenail will need to come off, but it's probably not an emergency (which is good, since this happened on a Saturday night, so it's at least 36 hours before the vet will be open) unless Sheba seems particularly distressed about it. She licks the foot a lot, and (understandably) tries to bite us if we attempt to handle the foot at all, but other than those two things, you'd never know anything was going on, so we can probably wait to see the vet on Monday. But still. This took up essentially the whole evening.

By the way: Mercury actually is in retrograde at the moment (explanatory link -- see fn. 1), so if you need an explanation for anything going wrong for the next few weeks, you can use that. You're welcome.

I'd go crazy if I lost my files. Thankfully, my wife is OC about all things computer related in this household and does regular back-ups of everyones files on external hard drives. Glad to hear your story eventually had a happy ending and I hope Sheba is all better by now.

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Mr_Subjunctive used to work at a family-owned greenhouse / garden center in Iowa City, IA. As of 7 December 2016, he has 1588 houseplants, which is both too damn many and not quite enough. Most are Anthuriums.

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The thoughts, opinions, life choices, etc. discussed in this blog are those of its author, and are not necessarily endorsed by his former employer, nor were they ever necessarily endorsed by his former employer before she was former. In fact, I'm pretty sure we disagreed about a lot of stuff, which was additional incentive not to discuss anything that didn't relate pretty directly to plants. And as far as it goes, we disagreed about a fair amount of stuff directly relating to plants, too.

In any case. Nothing in this blog should be taken to represent my former employer's views on anything, except for the few things explicitly identified as her opinions, and even then it's possible I've misunderstood or exaggerated what her actual views were. So if you want to know what she thinks about stuff you should just ask her.